Several weeks ago Fitbit gave me a chance to visit CSM training in Bucharest which was held by Ken Rubin. This one was really interesting. It was really fruitful to get some real-world insights from such an experienced coach.

The most important idea I’ve brought home is that Scrum does not bring lots of restrictions. It’s mostly a framework like Spring which provides backbone to your application. But it’s all up to you and your team how to put life around this backbone. This training has also shown a more broad picture of where things come from in my current company. From my point of view it’s not just a framework to develop projects. Things like transparency, lack of position recognition and team responsibilities change the general culture in the company.

This also means that it’s pretty much impossible and probably impractical to bring Scrum into the outsource projects. At least that’s what I see based on the experience for the last 13 years. You can’t have real Scrum unless you have developers who can influence direction of the project. Scrum brings opportunities for the team to choose tasks based on business priority and capacity, not on the last-minute demand of the customer. So it seems like one of the greatest benefit of Scrum is one of the limiting factor for Scrum spreading in Belarusian software development market.

I was slightly disappointed by the exam itself. The questions were rather simple. I would even say that it was not worth doing that much preparation for it. However it might be due to the fact that we are already practicing a good Scrum in our team/company.

Unlike other certifications there is no any supervision for the CSM exam. Exam is not limited in time either. Agile Manifesto and Scrum Guide are more than enough to answer the questions in the exam.

The exam is passed and I can name myself a “Certified Scrum Master” for the next two years. However given the level of certification exam – there are some doubts in having this certificate.